Alright. Home Depot.

At Home Depot, we have some of the most wickedly scheming customers ever. I swear there are some that walk in the doors and think “I really feel like putting wood on the floor” or “Today is a good day to move stuff around that isn’t mine“.

When a customer walks in with the urge to put some wood on the floor, they are very smart (in an inherently evil kinda way) about it. The one peice of lumber that I have the most problems with is the pressure treated 2X12X16: The single largest and heaviest peice of wood we sell. So Customers seek out the biggest, widest, heaviest boards they can find and put them on the ground so I have to go around and pick them up. Now, I have to admit… there is something heavier in my department: Drywall. 4X8 sheets, with two taped together. This is another big problem in our department. The other day I noticed a customer taking several sheets of drywall off his cart and stacking them not 10 feet from where they belonged. I don’t know if he wanted to be annoying or was just too stupid to realize it would take him just as much work to put them where they belong… or even to leave them on the cart so that we could roll them over to where they go instead of dragging them. Grr…

Want more stories of heavy stuff? Concrete: The stuff nightmares are made of. Broken bags are a huge issue. A couple nights ago I had to take a cart with around 750 pounds of concrete and sand from broken bags. As I was lifting the first bag into the garbage shoot (about 4 feet off the ground), I felt the bag tear, ever so slightly, in a new place (I had the original hole facing up (which is the best way to carry a broken beg of concrete, fyi)). My heart sank, ’cause I knew I was about to have a little mess to clean up. No. there was nothing little about it. The good news was that the bag was done tearing. The bad news is that the entire thing pretty much desintegrated in my hands. Instantly I was enveloped by a grey cloud of concrete. I still have a few ponds of it in my apron pockets. Today I blew my nose and it was still a little grey. Needless to say, breathing was not nearly as high on my priority list as was getting the heck out of that cloud. Have you ever eaten concrete? It doesn’t taste very good. After I was all done disposing of my trash and walking back to my department (which is conveniently placed on the opposite end of the store), I noticed that I had some mixed and dried concrete on my wrist around my watch. It was then that I learned that sweat works just fine for mixing cement in place of plain water.

So next time you’re in a store and want to tear a hole in a bag to see what the stuff looks like, or have the urge to put stuff on the ground, Stop. Look around. And don’t. Just don’t.

This has been silly ranting with Steve. Tune in next time to hear Steve say, “Have I ever told you about how much Subway sucks?”

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.